1. Teyla

Teyla brushes her hair, long slow strokes with the comb Charin gave her on her fifteenth birthday. It’s made of the bones of an Elehai, from a far off world, abandoned by its inhabitants before Teyla could ever visit it. She looks at herself in the mirror, deep dark eyes, shorter hair, less regal but practical among these people.

She has chosen the midriff-bearing top she uses in practice. He likes this top. He likes her heaving bosom as they fight. She can tell by the way he never quite looks at her.

She debates adding some of the face-paint Lieutenant Parker has gifted her. But she has never been as concerned with her appearance as the young blonde officer. She is a warrior at heart and she longs to be accepted as one. And yet, she weaves her hair into a complicated plait nonetheless. Yesterday, he saw her as a soldier, gun pointed down at him. She does not want to remind him of her almost-betrayal, of that ugliness. She wants him to see her as beautiful.

Teyla sighs, leaving with one last look in the mirror. He will accept her, as he always has. Why should things have changed?

His quarters are not far away, for which she is grateful. Despite all her proud defiance, Teyla still does not like the way some of the Marines look at her in the hallways, like she is some exotic object of affection, like they can capture her with their gaze. She will never be captured, unwillingly.

But it is a quiet evening, and she sees no one in the halls, steeling herself for what she is about to do. She is about to give in to something she has never let herself want until now. It sends an illicit thrill up her spine – to know that she is the one whom the man who could have anyone has chosen. It is a girlish thought, she knows, but she cannot quell the deep sense of pride welling in her chest. Pride has always been her downfall.

When the door opens, he is lounging on the bed, a book propped up in his lap, looking relaxed and so normal, only the small white bandage peeking out from beneath his t-shirt a signal of how wrong the previous day has gone.

But then he meets her eyes, and she sees that like a lot of things about him, this relaxed air is just another mask. “Teyla.” He pushes himself up into a sitting position, leaving her space to sit beside him. “You’re looking nice today.” He notes the hair. He hasn’t seen it like this before.

She smiles a slow warm smile, like the warmth stirring in her belly. He does want her. It is the second time he’s proved it. “Thank you, John.”

He raises his eyebrows. “John? So you admit it’s really me.”

“I trust Dr. Beckett’s assessment, yes.”

He nods. “Good. Is there anything I can do for you? I mean, page 135 was really exciting and all, but I could be convinced to tear myself away.”

“First I would like to apologize . . .”

He holds a hand up. “I know you didn’t want to, Teyla. And if you had needed to, I would’ve forgiven you. One person’s life versus more than half the expedition – it’s an easy choice. Even if it is me.” He fixes her with one of his most charming deflections, a dazzling grin that almost takes her attention away from the desperation in his eyes.

She nods. She does not blame herself. He’s right. It was a hard action, but an easy decision.

He reaches out and takes her hand, smiling another smaller smile. “Though thanks for not jumping on the bandwagon as soon as she said ‘shoot.’”

He is not one who is quick to touch people, and his touches are always both necessary and calculated. He likes to be the one to initiate the contact. This much, she knows. But he has initiated it. He is the one that started all this, joining her for a cup of tea her last morning on her homeworld. He is the one that kissed her with such animal passion. And he is the one who cares for her more than she knew.

He has a way of making everyone feel special, and Teyla is no exception. But, she thinks she leans up to brush her lips against his, he wants someone to single him out. They are so similar, liked and respected by all, set apart by rank and their own necessary distance; but in giving hope to so many, they deserve hope in return. They deserve this.

His lips are soft as his cheeks are rough with stubble, and he nibbles gently at her lips, like a baby does at its mother’s breast. The contact is almost involuntary. It’s sweet, a charming contrast to the loud voice and the hard eyes of yesterday.

When she pulls back, his eyes are wide with surprise. He sighs, brushing her cheek with hands that a day ago gripped a weapon with the intent to kill. “Why do I never see this coming?”

Teyla knows the answer to that. He doesn’t see it coming because he doesn’t want to anticipate anything. He doesn’t want to hope. He doesn’t want to believe in romance, though he does, because he thinks he does not deserve it.

“I care about you too, John.”

He sighs. “Teyla . . . that wasn’t me. I . . . I would never lead you on like that. He told you that because he didn’t want to die.”

“So, you feel nothing?” How could she have misread him? They share a connection. He cannot deny it. Perhaps it is not the passionate love that would cause her to forsake the lives of many to save him. Perhaps it is not the kind of love that would let them fall immediately into each others arms, all rules and propriety forgotten. But it is something. It is the most that Teyla has ever let herself feel, and it is he who began it.

He sighs. “I care about you, Teyla. You know I do. But we can’t do this.”

“Why not, John? Why not be happy?”

“Because it wouldn’t make me happy. And I’m not sure it would work for you either.”

Teyla nods. That is a good reason, perhaps the best. “We shall not speak of this again.”

He shakes his head, but she captures its restless motion, feeling him flinch slightly at the contact. She brings her forehead to his, relishing in his slight discomfort.

Even now she cannot decipher his masks. She does not know if he could not be with her because he does not want her or because he thinks the situation is wrong. She only knows that he too would never put her life before the lives of many.

She can take comfort only in the fact that she is not alone in her incapacity to feel so deeply.

2. Ronon

He was expecting to see Sheppard there when he woke or he was expecting news that Sheppard had somehow been killed. He was not expecting McKay and Teyla making excuses, both graceful and garbled, about why Sheppard was relatively unharmed, but still not there.

It hurt, just a little, to think that Sheppard did not want to see him. Maybe Sheppard did not trust him as much as Ronon believed, or as he wanted to believe when that thing wearing Sheppard’s face had told him. Maybe, despite all of the times he’d risked his life to save the man, he was still a replacement for that insecure young boy Sheppard had lost to the lust of power.

But Sheppard came. He always came, out of duty and compassion if not out of desire. He looked troubled, but healthy, despite the white hospital scrubs and slightly paradoxical smile he wore.

“Hey,” Sheppard said, almost warily.

“Hey,” Ronon grunted back. His tongue still felt heavy and thick and his limbs lethargic. He had to force the awareness to track Sheppard’s restless pacing across the room. He did not like the drugs of these people – they made one weak.

“So . . .” Sheppard did something blurry and nervous with his hands, looking down on them. “I guess I owe you an apology.”

Ronon shook his head. “No. I owe you an apology.”

“How do you figure that? Considering I’m the one who tricked you into giving me a weapon, let you get shot, and then stole your gun. Not to mention all the sneering and bad-guy dialogue.”

“It wasn’t you.”

“He played on your trust in me . . .”

“It’s my fault then, for trusting him. I failed you. I didn’t think.”

“Well, Ronon, he sounded like me. He said exactly what I would’ve said. If that was what really happened – if Caldwell had been taken over and not me, I would’ve done the same. I would’ve found you and I would’ve tried to get control back myself. I wouldn’t have handed myself in.”

Ronon understood this. Despite the relaxed exterior, Sheppard was as restless as Ronon. He could not stand to be left out of the action.

Ronon nodded. “It was reasonable for me to believe it was you. But it would’ve been smart for me to assume that it wasn’t.” Ronon was not a smart man. He was a fighter, and not a strategist. He would always have to trust men like Sheppard to make those kinds of decisions, because when he tried to make them himself, like this time, they would always be wrong.

“But you trusted me, Ronon. It’s good to know that someone trusts you that much.”

Only Sheppard could see redemption in weakness. Sheppard would have condoned Ronon’s loyalty to Kell. He would have said that there was no way Ronon could have saved all those men from massacre, even when it was an order Sheppard himself probably would have disobeyed.

Sheppard gave him a small encouraging smile. Sheppard’s smiles and Sheppard’s approval were given like rewards. It was for this that Ronon had let himself grow weak.

He could not be angry with Sheppard. But Ronon was still plenty angry with himself.

3. Elizabeth

She’s read the same sentence five times already, she realizes. It’s ridiculous to assume that she’s going to get anything done today when all she can think about is the weight of a gun in her hand, the fluid motion of a fist crashing into the delicate bones of a face, her body suddenly alive beneath the will of another, and the hatred of another living being burning so deep that she would be willing to forsake so many innocent lives for the simple satisfaction of one kill.

Elizabeth knows that she will never feel that strongly about anything ever again. She does not even hate the Wraith so much that she would kill one in cold blood if she knew that it would never again have to opportunity to feed. She believes in necessary sacrifice, but even after all this, vengeance is still incomprehensible to her. Her emotions have never been as pure as Phoebus’. She has felt neither love nor hate unmitigated by circumstance. Perhaps this is why Simon chose not to abandon Earth for her. She would never abandon Atlantis for him.

Dr. Lin’s theory of Wraith cultural origins stays laid out in front of her as the door chimes, waking her from troubled thoughts.

Unlike those with the natural gene, she must stand to activate the door-lock.

John Sheppard is standing there, looking handsome and guileless and utterly unshaken by the events of the past day, lounging casually against the door in jeans and a tight black T-shirt. He looks like a character out of a Penthouse Letter, and it makes her hide her eyes and blush every damn time.

He doesn’t want her and she shouldn’t want him, but she can’t help but fall prey to the inadvertent flirtation and the easy charm. John has a way of making you want to please him. She’s heard Caldwell refer to it as ‘his damned cult of personality’, muttered under his breath. She can understand why Stephen says it, but she still falls for it almost every time.

And yet Elizabeth was born a politician and she knows how to trade favors and win loyalties of her own. And John is loyal to those he chooses, especially loyal to those who will defend him. So John’s weapons of effortless manipulation and trustworthy innocence have in turn become hers. She’s just got to be careful not to shoot herself in the foot.

“John, what can I do for you?” She steps aside, letting him in.

He shrugs, stepping inside and looking around. He seems almost surprised by her quarters, though he has seen them before. “I had a question.”

“Oh?” She sits, motioning for him to do the same. She feels almost ridiculous, sitting ramrod straight on her bed (a habit learned from years practicing the cello) while he sprawls in a lazy contortion in her desk chair, picking up the stress ball Colonel O’Neill sent for her on the first Daedelus run and tossing it up in the air.

“Well . . . I was just wondering . . . why me?”

She squints, frowning. Even when he’s the one asking the questions, John makes you work for any kind of intimacy. “’Why you?’ in terms of coming to Atlantis, in terms of living a life when your body can be taken over by an alien consciousness, or did you actually come here to ask a rhetorical question?”

He chuckles. “No. ‘Why me?’ as in, why did Phoebus pick me? I don’t think it’s because she thought I’d look good with a gunshot wound.”

Elizabeth shrugs, deflecting. “There are a lot of reasons. Maybe she wanted to cripple our military operation by taking both of us. Maybe she thought she’d have a better chance to keep Atlantis out of the fight if you weren’t coordinating. Or that the others would be more reluctant to interfere because it was their commanding officer they were shooting at. Maybe she wanted someone with equal security clearance so it’d be an equal playing field.”

John shook his head. “No. In the end she was going to manipulate Teyla into killing me. She didn’t want to keep the others out of it and she didn’t care if she shot me when it was someone else who had tied me up. If she wanted someone she could beat, she should’ve picked Beckett. You were inside her head. I heard everything Thalen was thinking. You know, Elizabeth. Please tell me.”

But she doesn’t want John to know the answer to that question. Not now, not ever. “Because she thought she could manipulate you into a long-overdue romantic reunion.”

John nods to himself, looking slightly disgusted. “Because she thought that I’d never experienced love like that . . . that I’d take the risk because I wanted to.” Then he looks up, gaze suddenly piercing. “But she got that impression from you.”

Elizabeth laughed. “I think everyone has a little bit of a romantic in them, John. Even Rodney willingly agreed. You were the first to give her the opportunity to bring it up.”

John seems relatively satisfied, launching suddenly out of his slouch. A lingering memory of having him hunting her makes Elizabeth flinch.

He winces slightly. “Sorry. Look, I’m gonna grab something to eat now. At the risk of stoking the fires of the already wild rumor mill, wanna come with me?” He smiles his most charming smile, clearly desperate for them to move past this.

“Well, I have been wanting to discuss the progress of the genetically modified rice Dr. Singh has proposed planting on the mainland, but somehow you’re always too busy for the meetings.” She tries to keep the flirtatious teasing in her voice to a minimum, but with John, she can never help herself.

He groans. “And I thought Phoebus was the one out to get me. It was really you, wasn’t it?”

She laughs lightly, refusing to show how close he is to the truth.

‘Which one of these fine men would you like to kiss, Elizabeth?’ Phoebus’ inner voice had cooed, drowning out Elizabeth’s screams of protest.

‘John Sheppard.’ The words had come, unbidden.

Elizabeth can’t blame herself for things done with her body without her consent, but she can blame herself for that.

4. Stephen

“I never would’ve figured you for such a romantic, Sheppard,” Stephen smirked, nodding to a group of Marines as they walked deeper into the city, surveying the damage. McKay was already requesting a crate of specially engineered fiberglass cable for the ZPM station, and he wanted Stephen to shove off today so he could have it ‘now, now, now.’ God, dealing with McKay was such a nightmare. That Sheppard could handle him was at least one thing Stephen could admire about the man.

Sheppard shrugged in that falsely casual way of his that signaled that no matter how much Stephen tried to get to know him, Sheppard would never make things easy for him. “Well you know me, how I love ‘to blave.’”

“Huh?” Stephen often wondered how Sheppard passed the mental health portion of the Air Force entry requirements. Then again, he wasn’t actually the weirdest soldier under Stephen’s command. Down in engineering, he had a naked alien and a woman who seemed to live her entire life with the hiccups.

“The Princess Bride . . . ‘to blave’ . . . ‘true love’ . . . Miracle Max? The reason to not be mostly-dead? Never mind, Sir.”

Stephen did not dignify that with a response. He’d write it off as the weirds. Sheppard had spent two tours on the ice and then almost two years in another galaxy. He was bound to go a little bit crazy. It was par for the course in the Stargate program – just look at General O’Neill.

They rounded the corner to find supply crates riddled with gunfire. A team of Marines were still emptying and checking the contents for damage, a small blonde doctor with angry features overseeing them unenthusiastically.

“No, it’s supposed to look like that,” she said with a sigh.

“Wow, we sure did tear this place up. Sorry about that, by the way,” Sheppard said, staring at the floor, a spotless area, disinfected recently to remove the blood.

“You don’t need to apologize, Colonel. I already told you I don’t blame you,” Stephen remarked, exasperatedly. But then he finished. “I was against it from the beginning, you know. Freely giving over the military commander of this base to an alien consciousness isn’t strategically acceptable, even in the name of true love.”

Sheppard nodded. “I know, Sir. It was a mistake.”

Sheppard said it too easily. Even if they both knew that they were lucky to escape with as little damage as they did, clearly, Sheppard thought this was another opportunity for a little jab of insubordination. “But?” Stephan asked, impatiently.

Sheppard smirked. “But if you’d really been against it, you would’ve stopped me.”

Stephen could write it off as Sheppard’s way of saying that they were even now – Stephen could stop apologizing for getting compromised by a Goa’uld and Sheppard could stop apologizing for his closet romanticism, but it wasn’t just that . . . it was that . . . if Dr. Weir had asked him the same favor with that kind of flushed sincerity, he would’ve accepted the invitation as well.

And his wife had the nerve to say that Stephen’d lost his sense of romance in the war.

5. Rodney

Sheppard had not been able to find a single copy of ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’ in this entire city, which made Rodney immeasurably happy. It had been the same after they found the aged Elizabeth in the stasis unit. Sheppard sat Rodney down and made him watch ‘Back to the Future.’ He needed to see the happy entertainment version in order to make the real one less painful. Sheppard really did want to live his life as James T. Kirk - meet some wacky aliens, make a little love, and reset back to the same old characters next week. No ghosts, no nightmares, and no lasting emotional connections.

Rodney could understand that, but at the same time, he wanted no part in it, even if it was just a harmless little movie. Rodney didn’t want to think about the events of the previous day. He didn’t want to think about Colonel Caldwell with glowing eyes or Elizabeth with that maniacal glee in her voice or Sheppard’s angry frustration.

Rodney wasn’t really there for most of the action. Teyla and Ronon suffered the fallout from their very own Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but still Rodney couldn’t seem to come down from the adrenaline high. If it had taken him just a minute longer to break that code, Teyla would’ve shot Sheppard, and it would’ve been nobody’s fault except some psycho bitch-woman of an alien in Elizabeth’s body; but none of them would’ve been able to forgive themselves anyway.

It was a bad idea from the beginning, Rodney knew. But he’d played his part in getting there. When Sheppard said he had understood what it felt like to have that kind of rush, to know that your loved-one was there, waiting for one last goodbye, Rodney couldn’t resist rubbing it in his face. Captain Kirk would never have that.

Rodney told himself that men like Sheppard were really the unlucky ones. They had alien babes falling in a pile at their feet, but not a single one of them saw beyond the exotic façade. In the end, Sheppard would die in some crazy act of heroic self-sacrifice, without even knowing what love was, and that was the vindication the not-ridiculously-attractive-and-heroic guys like Rodney had when looking at people like Sheppard. Even if Rodney himself had never felt something like that either.

Sheppard was an attractive man. He was even a complicated man and a good friend, but none of his bimbos would get to know him the way Rodney had, and he’d never be able to love them any more than he’d be able to convince Rodney that this tense smile was genuine.

“So, I couldn’t find it,” Sheppard said with a sigh, sinking back onto Rodney’s couch, raising his arms to cradle his head like he usually did, only to wince when it pulled at the wound on his arm.

“I’m sorry . . . about that. It was instinct. You were shooting at me; I shot back at you.”

Sheppard shrugged, eyes tired. “Be glad you mostly missed, otherwise you’d be in a lot more trouble.”

“No kidding,” Rodney said darkly. He didn’t even want to think of what have happened if he’d gotten a real hit. “Does it hurt?”

“Not really. You mostly got scar tissue, and it was just a ricochet anyway. Your apology is accepted.” Sheppard delivered the line with such annoying pomp that Rodney wanted to smack him.

“Well, that’s not all I have to apologize for!” It wasn’t really the threat his tone implied.

“No?” Sheppard was amused now, eyebrows raised in playful expectation. And that just wasn’t fair. Sheppard wasn’t allowed to get over it just like that.

“I’m sorry I . . . I goaded you into it.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I implied that you couldn’t possibly know what it felt like to feel that kind of emotion.” Rodney had seen the wounded look in Sheppard’s eyes, the desire to feel something so intensely.

“Well, as much as we all like to think that every action in our puny little ape-brains originates from the great and powerful McKay, it wasn’t your fault. You were right. I did want to feel what it was like to be that in love with someone. The fact that I was desperate enough for it to override my own common sense was my fault, not yours.”

Shit. Rodney hadn’t meant to open the door to another one of the infamous sessions of Sheppard’s self-loathing. Quick, he had to say something . . . anything. “What did it feel like?” Great one, McKay, that really distracted from the experience.

Sheppard frowned a little. “It was terrifying.”

“Well, I could imagine, having your friends shooting at you, not being about to control your own body . . .”

“No, you can’t imagine Rodney. Because I’ve wanted to kill people before, but I’ve never felt that kind of hate.”

“Not even when Kolya . . .”

“I killed 64 people during that storm, Rodney. And you know what I felt when I did it?”

Rodney shook his head. He never wanted to have to feel the implications of something like that.

“Absolutely nothing.”

Sheppard’s eyes were deep, dark despite the flecks of gold reflected in them. Rodney found it hard to believe that as impulsive as John, someone who pumped a Wraith full of lead out of nothing but pure hatred, could be terrified by someone else’s intensity. But then again, Sheppard’s anger was always cold. Rodney was right in that even if Sheppard was willing to die or kill in order to protect people, he’d never enjoy it the way Thalen and Phoebus had.

Rodney sighed, patting Sheppard awkwardly on the leg, glad when the man broke his gaze to look down quizzically at Rodney’s hand. “Well, while you were scouring the city, I did manage to find us a movie.”

“Really? What?” Sheppard asked eagerly, opening the case and pulling out the DVD. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith? But, Rodney, you said this movie had ‘a plot that a two-year-old could tear apart with its rabid teeth, a fictional understanding of the laws of physics, and dialogue you’d expect to find on the back of a cereal box.’”

Rodney shrugged. “Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are two very attractive people. And they have guns.”

Sheppard smiled, one of his truly genuine smiles, swinging an arm over Rodney’s shoulders and giving him a quick squeeze. “Thanks, Rodney. You really do know my tastes, don’t you?”

Rodney snorted. “Just don’t expect me to wait thousands of years in stasis for one last kiss.”

John laughed. “Aw, honey, you say the sweetest things.”

FIN